To:
Guardian CiF
Re: The root cause of man's inhumanity to his fellow man and animalDate:
Saturday 4 August 07

In
response to article, "The lives of others", on animal welfare,
by Benjamin Zephaniah
Link to article
and thread at The
Guardian.

What is the "root cause" of man's inhumanity
to man and animal, which is the subject of this
thread?

It is the same as that of the Sustainability Problem
(global warming etc): a socio-economic order
rooted in and dependent on man's animal nature and behaviour, which it
developed (naturally enough, in view of human origins) both to serve
and
exploit.

To "serve and exploit". That's the key.

Millions of
years of
evolution formed and adapted human nature and behaviour to
SERVE the
individual and his extended family group in the Darwinian struggle for
survival and advantage by EXPLOITING the natural environment, which
included other animals AND other, rival, groups of humans (by robbing
them, trading with them, enslaving them, using them as allies, etc).

With the advent of civilization and the creation of an
artificial socio-economic environment things got rather
muddled. Leaders were able to profit from
appealing to their group's sense of "family loyalty and
mutuality", while at the same time exploiting it for their own
individual, family, or class advantage. In the middle ages,
these developments, directed by an alliance of aristocracy
and clergy with a common interest in exploiting the peasant
masses, led to the creation of
the "nation
state". It was there to serve society as a whole, they
claimed, which to some extent it did, but its primarily purpose was as
an "instrument of exploitation", in the same way that a cattle farm is,
serving the needs of its
cattle, in order to exploit them for the benefit of the farmer.

Aristocracy and clergy have largely been
displaced by other elites (in politics, business, the media etc.),
which are less rigid, more "meritocratic" and
theoretically, at least, open to everyone, but the
"primary function" of the nation state remains the same: the
maintenance of society in order to facilitate its exploitation.

The source of virtually all our social, economic and
environmental problems lies in our failure to recognise that the
"primary function" of our socio-economic order (the nation state and
the economy) is not to serve society, which
we rationalize and
delude ourselves into believing, but to exploit it.

Why has this profound truth, which follows logically
from Darwin's theory of evolution and human origins, not been
recognised or acknowledged by those academics whose fields of expertise
it falls in (anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, social
scientists,
psychologists,
etc)? The reason, I think, is because, like everyone
else, their total immersion in and dependency on the existing
socio-economic order blinds them to it.